1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains to cooking grills.
2. Background
Cooking grills are extremely popular in the United States and elsewhere for outdoor cooking during the warm months of the year. However, they also are often used indoors and/or during the colder months of the year.
A conventional cooking grill comprises at least a cooking chamber, a grilling surface disposed in the cooking chamber, and one or more heating elements, such as a flame manifold and/or an infrared heater, proximate (typically beneath) the grilling surface within the cooking chamber. The cooking chamber is commonly provided by a metal housing comprising two parts configured in a generally clamshell type arrangement, within which the heating elements and grilling surface are disposed. Typically, the top half of the housing is hingedly connected to the bottom half of the housing so that the top half of the housing can be tilted up relative to the bottom half in order to provide the user access to the cooking chamber. Particularly, the user must have access to the grilling surface in order to place food on the grilling surface, remove food from grilling surface, and generally observe the food to determine when it is done cooking. The heating elements are coupled to a fuel source (e.g., a self-contained source such as a propane tank mounted to a base of the cooking grill) in order to create the heat for cooking.
The grilling surface usually is disposed above and close to the heating elements inside the cooking chamber. It usually comprises a grating positioned above the flame manifolds made of metal, porcelain, or another material that can retain heat from the flames and release that heat to food placed in contact with the grilling surface in order to sear the food where it contacts the grill grating. The grating provides a surface on which food to be cooked can be supported, but which has openings therethrough so that the food placed on the grill is directly exposed to the flame and/or heat from the heating elements through the openings or spacings in the grating.
Grills of the prior art suffer from many drawbacks. For instance, the cooking of the food in a cooking grill is the result of two separate phenomena. First, the bottom side of the food that is in contact with the grilling surface is heated directly by the flame and/or contact with the surface of the grating. However, the entire piece of food is also heated and cooked by means of convection by the heat that builds up inside the cooking chamber as a result of the flames. However, every time the user opens the top of the cooking chamber, as is frequently necessary to insert, remove, or observe the food being cooked, all of the heat that has built up inside the cooking chamber that cooks the food by convection escapes and cooking by convection essentially halts. When the grill cover is closed again, then the heat can build up again over a certain number of minutes and cooking by convection again commences. Thus, opening the top of the cooking chamber slows down the overall cooking process and wastes fuel. It also ultimately tends to lead to drier food when it is finally cooked.
Another drawback of conventional cooking grills is that, typically, only one type of cooking, namely, grilling, can be performed. For instance, one cannot fry food in a conventional grill because there is no solid continuous surface on which the food can cook, only the grilling surface, which has openings in it. Also, there is no convenient location in a conventional grill to place water for steaming food.
Yet another drawback of conventional cooking grills is that drippings from the food that is cooked on the grilling surface fall through the openings in the grilling surface onto the flame manifolds and/or the bottom of the cooking chamber. While some buildup of the drippings onto a surface above the flame manifolds is desirable since it adds flavor to the cooking, most of the drippings will fall onto the flame manifolds themselves and/or to the bottom surface of the cooking chamber. This is undesirable because the food drippings tend to cause the flame manifolds or bottom surface of the housing to corrode over time. Hence, the bottom of most cooking grills are sloped toward one central location so that the drippings will flow to a single location in the bottom surface of the housing where they can exit the cooking chamber through a hole and into a container disposed beneath the hole. The user can occasionally remove the container, empty its contents, and replace it beneath the hole. This process is performed relatively infrequently and thus is easy to forget to perform. If the user forgets to empty the container and the container overflows, it may damage the deck or other surface on which the cooking grill is placed. Furthermore, as noted above, the container is positioned beneath the bottom of the cooking chamber and, therefore, typically is difficult to access.